Tuesday, January 12, 2010

Non-fic-tion

I need a routine. Without regular working and/or school hours to force my life into a routine, I'm floundering around, starting a project here, reading a page or two there, without really getting much of anything done. Pray that I get a job in the teaching field soon. Please. The district that I live in is not hiring teachers or substitutes. Neither is the district next door. How can this be??? I was counting on at least getting on as a substitute in order to make it through until districts start hiring for next school year. I am feeling pretty downtrodden. I applied with the Sylvan Learning centers that are hiring around the Houston area today. We shall see.

I decided to assign myself an essay. I've been thinking about my summer in New York a lot lately, so that is, naturally, what I'm going to right about. It will be nonfiction, clearly, but I think I can say with some degree of certainty that there will be slightly fictitious embellishments. Anyhow, I wrote a couple of "introductory" paragraphs a little while ago, so I'm just going to post them here for you all to read and let me know what you think. Do you like where it seems to be heading? If I were going to expand on anything I've already written, what would it be? What would you change? Etc. The title is a working title, one that I borrowed from a much shorter essay about NYC that I wrote in a nonfiction workshop. But I think I'll keep it.

Southern Fiddle

To begin is the most difficult task. After all, when something (or some place, in my case) means as much to you as the city of New York means to me, where do you begin to tell the story? And how do you even decide what the story is about? It was one summer, and it is the one summer that feels like the only summer there ever was.

I am positive that were I to return today, the lenses would be lifted and none of the buildings, subway cars, or sidewalks would look the same. But still, its just like when people speak of the great loves of their lives—they never recall the bad times, that time you screamed at each other all night over (initially) the credit bill, his jugular throbbing and threatening to explode all over the newly-installed kitchen tile, you making a show of putting together an overnight bag, because you were going to spend the night at your sister’s, goddamn it, if he couldn’t talk about this like a reasonable adult. We never remember stuff like that. This story will not remember stuff like that, because this story, my friend, is a love story.

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